The new update will be focused on the terrain changes being introduced. This kind of thing hasn’t been messed with in vanilla Minecraft for over a year now, so it’s definitely an important update. It will of course result in borders on old maps, so a new one will be recommended.

Biomes have been put into four main categories: snow-covered, cold, medium, and dry/warm. Biomes will avoid getting placed next to a biome that is too different to itself (sometimes this still happens, but it’s very rare now and not all over the place)

We’ve added a whole bunch of new biomes…

… and most biomes have uncommon/rare variations that you may run into

We’ve also added a bunch of new terrain features, such as new flowers and trees

Mojang stated that the main focus of these changes was to make the biome placement more realistic (meaning no more snow/desert borders), add more variety (meaning more biomes), and making oceans smaller. The ocean debate has been raging in the Minecraft community for a while now, with people advocating the giant ocean system saying it makes land more distinguished, while others are saying the big masses of water are boring and the 3000 block oceans (in this new update and before the Beta 1.8 terrain update) that don’t take up the whole map are the way to go. Maybe a toggle is on the way? Dinnerbone seems to be really into adding options lately.

There hasn’t even been a snapshot of this update yet, so it is far from done, but there has been enough info out to get a feeling of what it will look like. The debate on oceans rages on, but the rest of the changes seem universally accepted. One also needs to keep in mind the pictures shown are of a huge landmass, meaning what may look like a small ocean dotted with land might be a vast expanse in-game. It’s all about the gameplay, so we’ll just have to wait and play it to get a final verdict on the changes.

We’ll be sure to keep you up to date with happenings regarding this update, as well as more, so stay tuned.

Do you like these changes? Do you want oceans to be big or small? Feel free to sound off in the comment section below.